Children at a community health event in Timor Leste, one of the locations where Health Alliance International has maternal-child health programs. Photo credit: Jessica Dyer (MPH '15), George Povey Fellow.

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Biography

Stephen Bezruchka has been involved in international health issues since the 1970s when he set up the Dhorpatan Health Project in Nepal. In the 1980s he set up a remote district hospital there as a teaching hospital for Nepali doctors and supervised them. Subsequently he spearheaded efforts to get Kathmandu-based surgeons to teach skills to district medical officers. He observed relative health declines in the U.S. while working as an emergency physician. He seeded the phrase Population Health to UW in the late 1990s when he directed the Population Health Forum.

Currently he works to draw attention to the poor health status of people in the U.S. comapred to that in other rich nations through teaching, writing and talking. He has tried to accomplish this for two decades during which time the health status of people here as declined relative to that in other nations. The Institute of Medicine’s 2013 report: U.S. Health In International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health has languished. How to create awareness is the challenge.